Announcing The Publication of “MUMMERS EVE” by Dean Gessie

In the tradition of Chaucer, Swift and Orwell, Dean Gessie exposes the hypocrisy, hubris and grift that often underpin the human project. Mummers Eve juxtaposes cultural collisions, identity politics and family dysfunction through the vehicle of a peculiar social tradition of disguised celebrants at a neighbourhood party. The family matriarch, Adele, is a roiling maelstrom of self-interest and woke triumphalism, monetizing and politicizing her progressive views even as she clings to colonial values and traditions. In her slipstream, Adele’s four children are subjunctive beings of cynicism, boutique virtue, entitlement and self-absorption or, sometimes, victims, themselves, of perfidy and cruelty and the self-inflicted whorl of narcissism. Along the way, the foul-smelling mummer is both Adele’s moral center and gleeful accelerant to the emotional carnage that she and her family must endure. Mummers Eve is both carnival and wake, a festive elegy for those who wear dunce caps and keep time to the doomsday clock. Thomas Hobbes called it bellum omnium contra omnes or the war of all against all. This will not end well.